The phenomenal popularity of Canada’s new 10-year visas is a key factor behind the latest housing booms in Vancouver and Toronto, say immigration specialists.

“I often travel to China, where I see the great pride many take in investing their money in Canada” —­ particularly by taking advantage of 10-year visas to buy real estate, said George Lee, a Burnaby immigration lawyer.

In 2015, Canadian immigration officials issued 390,000 10-year, multiple-entry visas to residents of Mainland China, the largest cohort, with another 162,000 going to people from India.

The former Conservative government began offering the 10-year visas in February 2014. As a result, in that first year, the number of travel visas handed to Chinese nationals tripled to 337,000.

Lee says the visas, which allow people to travel freely to Canada each year and stay for at least six months at a time, have sparked an explosion in foreign travel and property speculation in Canada, particularly from China.

The multiple-entry visas have caused a migration “chain reaction,” Lee said, which often leads to international students becoming proxies for offshore real-estate investors.

“A multiple entry visa creates multiple effects,” said Lee.

“It’s one stone that kills many birds. And it impacts the real-estate market. The main purpose for a lot of this (interest in 10-year-visas) is to get a piece of Vancouver.”

That's a 250k gain for west Vancouver detached since January.
Nice find man.

So if somebody had bought detached property in September 2016 and sold in July 2017, how much would they have lost? Quite a lot by my calculations, and I'm not even including the huge transaction costs.

Of course, if they had bought condos they would be laughing all the way to the bank.

"The fewest July sales in a decade" is another reason I don't call the detached market "hot". This is from Steve Saretsky's latest detached sales report.

"Detached sales have slowed considerably in the last few months.

The data suggests this is more than a normal seasonal slow down. REBGV detached sales fell a modest 12% year over year, but now remain 20% below the ten year average for the month of July. Meanwhile, Vancouver West & East detached home sales recorded the fewest July sales over the past decade."